skin colour

[Allen Thrasher]

On Wed, 14 May 1997, Vidyasankar Sundaresan wrote:
> 
> Maybe. Unfortunately, nobody seems to appreciate that the Mahabharata
> revels in complexity. It cannot be analyzed in simple black-and-white
> terms. To begin with, there is a remarkable amount of sleeping around, so
> much so that Arjuna's concern about varNa-sankara as a negative result of
> war comes very late in the day! There are legitimate children from all
> kinds of relationships - pre-marital, extra-marital, polygamous,  
> polyandrous, you name it. Vyasa is a brAhmaNa, although his mother 
> is a fisher-woman. However, Vidura, his son, is lower than both brAhmaNa
> and kshatriya, because his mother is a servant woman. Kunti's sons by the
> various gods, after her marriage to Pandu, are considered kshatriyas, but
> Karna, her pre-marital son from Surya, ends up being a low caste (although
> fair-skinned in comic book depictions). 
> 
> S. Vidyasankar
> 


Postively Proustian.  Should we subtitle the epic "`a la recherche du yuga
perdu"?